Justices Consider Whether Tossing Out Fish Destroyed Records

WASHINGTON — Most of the justices seemed troubled by Supreme Court arguments on Wednesday about the prosecution of a Florida fisherman for throwing three undersize red grouper back into the Gulf of Mexico.

The fisherman, John L. Yates, was convicted of violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a federal law aimed primarily at white-collar crime. The law imposes a maximum sentence of 20 years for the destruction of “any record, document or tangible object” in order to obstruct an investigation.

Mr. Yates’s primary argument was that fish are not the sort of tangible objects with which the law was concerned.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. seemed to agree. He asked what people would say “if you stopped them on the street and said, ‘Is a fish a record, document or tangible object?’ ”

But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said it would be odd to let Mr. Yates throw fish overboard, destroying evidence, but to allow him to be prosecuted for tearing up photographs of the fish.

Though Mr. Yates seemed likely to prevail on his main argument, the justice’s real ire was focused elsewhere.

Some were critical of the decision to prosecute Mr. Yates at all.

“What kind of a mad prosecutor would try to send this guy up for 20 years?” Justice Scalia asked. (Mr. Yates was sentenced to 30 days’ imprisonment.)

The Supreme Court has been wary of stretching federal laws to fit minor crimes, ruling in June in Bond v. United States, for instance, that a chemical weapons treaty could not be used as the basis for a prosecution of a domestic dispute.

“Who do you have out there that exercises prosecutorial discretion?” Justice Scalia asked the government’s lawyer, Roman Martinez. “Is this the same guy that brought the prosecution in Bond last term?”

Mr. Martinez said Mr. Yates’s crime was a serious one, involving lying and a cover-up.

Chief Justice Roberts was skeptical. “You make him sound like a mob boss,” he said.

The case arose from a 2007 search of the Miss Katie, Mr. Yates’s fishing vessel. A Florida field officer, John Jones, boarded the ship at sea and noticed fish that seemed less than 20 inches long, which was under the minimum legal size of red grouper at the time.

Mr. Jones, an officer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and a federal deputy, measured the fish and placed the 72 he deemed too small in a crate. He issued a citation and instructed Mr. Yates to take the crate to port for seizure.

But Mr. Yates threw the fish overboard and had his crew replace them with larger ones. A second inspection in port found only 69 undersize fish and aroused suspicions, and a crew member eventually told law enforcement officials what had happened.

Some justices were wary of the sweep of the law, which applies to “any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States.”

Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the law would allow prosecution for the destruction of a census form. “The risk of arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement is a real one,” he said.

John L. Badalamenti, a lawyer for Mr. Yates, said that sustaining the law would mean that “the American people will be walking on eggshells.”

Mr. Martinez acknowledged that the law may be subject to attack as too broad and vague. But he said those issues were not squarely raised in the case argued Wednesday, Yates v. United States, No. 13-7451.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who is generally sympathetic to arguments from prosecutors, was skeptical.

“You are really asking the court to swallow something that is pretty hard to swallow,” he said. The law, he said, “is capable of being applied to really trivial matters, and yet each of those would carry a potential penalty of 20 years.”

The lawyers and justices for the most part resisted the temptation to make fish jokes. But Justice Kennedy got one in near the end of the argument.

“Perhaps Congress should have called this the Sarbanes-Oxley-Grouper Act,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Justices Consider Whether Tossing Out Fish Destroyed Records. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe